This is the story, among others, of Henry the waiter--or, as he now
prefers to call himself, Henri--told to me in the long dining-room of the
Riffel Alp Hotel, where I once stayed for a melancholy week "between
seasons," sharing the echoing emptiness of the place with two maiden
ladies, who talked all day to one another in frightened whispers. Henry's
construction I have discarded for its amateurishness; his method being
generally to commence a story at the end, and then, working backwards to
the beginning, wind up with the middle. But in all other respects I have
endeavoured to retain his method, which was individual; and this, I
think, is the story as he would have told it to me himself, had he told
it in this order:
My first place--well to be honest, it was a coffee shop in the Mile End
Road--I'm not ashamed of it. We all have our beginnings. Young
"Kipper," as we called him--he had no name of his own, not that he knew
of anyhow, and that seemed to fit him down to the ground--had fixed his
pitch just outside, between our door and the music hall at the corner;
and sometimes, when I might happen to have a bit on, I'd get a paper from
him, and pay him for it, when the governor was not about, with a mug of
coffee, and odds and ends that the other customers had left on their
plates--an arrangement that suited both of us. He was just about as
sharp as they make boys, even in the Mile End Road, which is saying a
good deal; and now and then, spying around among the right sort, and
keeping his ears open, he would put me up to a good thing, and I would
tip him a bob or a tanner as the case might be. He was the sort that
gets on--you know.
One day in he walks, for all the world as if the show belonged to him,
with a young imp of a girl on his arm, and down they sits at one of the
tables.
"Garsong," he calls out, "what's the menoo to-day?"
"The menoo to-day," I says, "is that you get outside 'fore I clip you
over the ear, and that you take that back and put it where you found it;"
meaning o' course, the kid.
She was a pretty little thing, even then, in spite of the dirt, with
those eyes like saucers, and red hair. It used to be called "carrots" in
those days. Now all the swells have taken it up--or as near as they can
get to it--and it's auburn.
"'Enery," he replied to me, without so much as turning a hair, "I'm
afraid you're forgetting your position. When I'm on the kerb shouting
'Speshul!' and you comes to me with yer 'a'penny in yer 'and, you're
master an' I'm man. When I comes into your shop to order refreshments,
and to pay for 'em, I'm boss. Savey? You can bring me a rasher and two
eggs, and see that they're this season's. The lidy will have a
full-sized haddick and a cocoa."
Well, there was justice in what he said. He always did have sense, and I
took his order. You don't often see anybody put it away like that girl
did. I took it she hadn't had a square meal for many a long day. She
polished off a ninepenny haddick, skin and all, and after that she had
two penny rashers, with six slices of bread and butter--"doorsteps," as
we used to call them--and two half pints of cocoa, which is a meal in
itself the way we used to make it. "Kipper" must have had a bit of luck
that day. He couldn't have urged her on more had it been a free feed.
"'Ave an egg," he suggested, the moment the rashers had disappeared. "One
of these eggs will just about finish yer."
"I don't really think as I can," says she, after considering like.
"Well, you know your own strength," he answers. "Perhaps you're best
without it. Speshully if yer not used to 'igh living."
I was glad to see them finish, 'cause I was beginning to get a bit
nervous about the coin, but he paid up right enough, and giv me a
ha'penny for myself.
That was the first time I ever waited upon those two, but it wasn't to be
the last by many a long chalk, as you'll see. He often used to bring her
in after that. Who she was and what she was he didn't know, and she
didn't know, so there was a pair of them. She'd run away from an old
woman down Limehouse way, who used to beat her. That was all she could
tell him. He got her a lodging with an old woman, who had an attic in
the same house where he slept--when it would run to that--taught her to
yell "Speshul!" and found a corner for her. There ain't room for boys
and girls in the Mile-End Road. They're either kids down there or
they're grown-ups. "Kipper" and "Carrots"--as we named her--looked upon
themselves as sweethearts, though he couldn't have been more than
fifteen, and she barely twelve; and that he was regular gone on her
anyone could see with half an eye. Not that he was soft about it--that
wasn't his style. He kept her in order, and she had just to mind, which
I guess was a good thing for her, and when she wanted it he'd use his
hand on her, and make no bones about it. That's the way among that
class. They up and give the old woman a friendly clump, just as you or
me would swear at the missus, or fling a boot-jack at her. They don't
mean anything more.
I left the coffee shop later on for a place in the city, and saw nothing
more of them for five years. When I did it was at a restaurant in Oxford
Street--one of those amatoor shows run by a lot of women, who know
nothing about the business, and spend the whole day gossiping and
flirting--"love-shops," I call 'em. There was a yellow-haired lady
manageress who never heard you when you spoke to her, 'cause she was
always trying to hear what some seedy old fool would be whispering to her
across the counter. Then there were waitresses, and their notion of
waiting was to spend an hour talking to a twopenny cup of coffee, and to
look haughty and insulted whenever anybody as really wanted something
ventured to ask for it. A frizzle-haired cashier used to make love all
day out of her pigeon-hole with the two box-office boys from the Oxford
Music Hall, who took it turn and turn about. Sometimes she'd leave off
to take a customer's money, and sometimes she wouldn't. I've been to
some rummy places in my time; and a waiter ain't the blind owl as he's
supposed to be. But never in my life have I seen so much love-making,
not all at once, as used to go on in that place. It was a dismal, gloomy
sort of hole, and spoony couples seemed to scent it out by instinct, and
would spend hours there over a pot of tea and assorted pastry. "Idyllic,"
some folks would have thought it: I used to get the fair dismals watching
it. There was one girl--a weird-looking creature, with red eyes and long
thin hands, that gave you the creeps to look at. She'd come in regular
with her young man, a pale-faced nervous sort of chap, at three o'clock
every afternoon. Theirs was the funniest love-making I ever saw. She'd
pinch him under the table, and run pins into him, and he'd sit with his
eyes glued on her as if she'd been a steaming dish of steak and onions
and he a starving beggar the other side of the window. A strange story
that was--as I came to learn it later on. I'll tell you that, one day.
I'd been engaged for the "heavy work," but as the heaviest order I ever
heard given there was for a cold ham and chicken, which I had to slip out
for to the nearest cook-shop, I must have been chiefly useful from an
ornamental point of view.
I'd been there about a fortnight, and was feeling pretty sick of it, when
in walked young "Kipper." I didn't know him at first, he'd changed so.
He was swinging a silver-mounted crutch stick, which was the kind that
was fashionable just then, and was dressed in a showy check suit and a
white hat. But the thing that struck me most was his gloves. I suppose
I hadn't improved quite so much myself, for he knew me in a moment, and
held out his hand.
"What, 'Enery!" he says, "you've moved on, then!"
"Yes," I says, shaking hands with him, "and I could move on again from
this shop without feeling sad. But you've got on a bit?" I says.
"So-so," he says, "I'm a journalist."
"Oh," I says, "what sort?" for I'd seen a good many of that lot during
six months I'd spent at a house in Fleet Street, and their get-up hadn't
sumptuousness about it, so to speak. "Kipper's" rig-out must have totted
up to a tidy little sum. He had a diamond pin in his tie that must have
cost somebody fifty quid, if not him.
"Well," he answers, "I don't wind out the confidential advice to old
Beaky, and that sort of thing. I do the tips, yer know. 'Cap'n Kit,'
that's my name."
"What, the Captain Kit?" I says. O' course I'd heard of him.
"Be'old!" he says.
"Oh, it's easy enough," he goes on. "Some of 'em's bound to come out
right, and when one does, you take it from me, our paper mentions the
fact. And when it is a wrong 'un--well, a man can't always be shouting
about himself, can 'e?"
He ordered a cup of coffee. He said he was waiting for someone, and we
got to chatting about old times.
"How's Carrots?" I asked.
"Miss Caroline Trevelyan," he answered, "is doing well."
"Oh," I says, "you've found out her fam'ly name, then?"
"We've found out one or two things about that lidy," he replies. "D'yer
remember 'er dancing?"
"I have seen her flinging her petticoats about outside the shop, when the
copper wasn't by, if that's what you mean," I says.
"That's what I mean," he answers. "That's all the rage now,
'skirt-dancing' they calls it. She's a-coming out at the Oxford
to-morrow. It's 'er I'm waiting for. She's a-coming on, I tell you she
is," he says.
"Shouldn't wonder," says I; "that was her disposition."
"And there's another thing we've found out about 'er," he says. He leant
over the table, and whispered it, as if he was afraid that anybody else
might hear: "she's got a voice."
"Yes," I says, "some women have."
"Ah," he says, "but 'er voice is the sort of voice yer want to listen
to."
"Oh," I says, "that's its speciality, is it?"
"That's it, sonny," he replies.
She came in a little later. I'd a' known her anywhere for her eyes, and
her red hair, in spite of her being that clean you might have eaten your
dinner out of her hand. And as for her clothes! Well, I've mixed a good
deal with the toffs in my time, and I've seen duchesses dressed more
showily and maybe more expensively, but her clothes seemed to be just a
framework to show her up. She was a beauty, you can take it from me; and
it's not to be wondered that the La-De-Das were round her when they did
see her, like flies round an open jam tart.
Before three months were up she was the rage of London--leastways of the
music-hall part of it--with her portrait in all the shop windows, and
interviews with her in half the newspapers. It seems she was the
daughter of an officer who had died in India when she was a baby, and the
niece of a bishop somewhere in Australia. He was dead too. There didn't
seem to be any of her ancestry as wasn't dead, but they had all been
swells. She had been educated privately, she had, by a relative; and had
early displayed an aptitude for dancing, though her friends at first had
much opposed her going upon the stage. There was a lot more of it--you
know the sort of thing. Of course, she was a connection of one of our
best known judges--they all are--and she merely acted in order to support
a grandmother, or an invalid sister, I forget which. A wonderful talent
for swallowing, these newspaper chaps has, some of 'em!
"Kipper" never touched a penny of her money, but if he had been her agent
at twenty-five per cent. he couldn't have worked harder, and he just kept
up the hum about her, till if you didn't want to hear anything more about
Caroline Trevelyan, your only chance would have been to lie in bed, and
never look at a newspaper. It was Caroline Trevelyan at Home, Caroline
Trevelyan at Brighton, Caroline Trevelyan and the Shah of Persia,
Caroline Trevelyan and the Old Apple-woman. When it wasn't Caroline
Trevelyan herself it would be Caroline Trevelyan's dog as would be doing
something out of the common, getting himself lost or summoned or
drowned--it didn't matter much what.
I moved from Oxford Street to the new "Horseshoe" that year--it had just
been rebuilt--and there I saw a good deal of them, for they came in to
lunch there or supper pretty regular. Young "Kipper"--or the "Captain"
as everybody called him--gave out that he was her half-brother.
"I'ad to be some sort of a relation, you see," he explained to me. "I'd
a' been 'er brother out and out; that would have been simpler, only the
family likeness wasn't strong enough. Our styles o' beauty ain't
similar." They certainly wasn't.
"Why don't you marry her?" I says, "and have done with it?"
He looked thoughtful at that. "I did think of it," he says, "and I know,
jolly well, that if I 'ad suggested it 'fore she'd found herself, she'd
have agreed, but it don't seem quite fair now."
"How d'ye mean fair?" I says.
"Well, not fair to 'er," he says. "I've got on all right, in a small
way; but she--well, she can just 'ave 'er pick of the nobs. There's one
on 'em as I've made inquiries about. 'E'll be a dook, if a kid pegs out
as is expected to, and anyhow 'e'll be a markis, and 'e means the
straight thing--no errer. It ain't fair for me to stand in 'er way."
"Well," I says, "you know your own business, but it seems to me she
wouldn't have much way to stand in if it hadn't been for you."
"Oh, that's all right," he says. "I'm fond enough of the gell, but I
shan't clamour for a tombstone with wiolets, even if she ain't ever Mrs.
Capt'n Kit. Business is business; and I ain't going to queer 'er pitch
for 'er."
I've often wondered what she'd a' said, if he'd up and put the case to
her plain, for she was a good sort; but, naturally enough, her head was a
bit swelled, and she'd read so much rot about herself in the papers that
she'd got at last to half believe some of it. The thought of her
connection with the well-known judge seemed to hamper her at times, and
she wasn't quite so chummy with "Kipper" as used to be the case in the
Mile-End Road days, and he wasn't the sort as is slow to see a thing.
One day when he was having lunch by himself, and I was waiting on him, he
says, raising his glass to his lips, "Well, 'Enery, here's luck to yer! I
won't be seeing you agen for some time."
"Oh," I says. "What's up now?"
"I am," he says, "or rather my time is. I'm off to Africa."
"Oh," I says, "and what about--"
"That's all right," he interrupts. "I've fixed up that--a treat. Truth,
that's why I'm going."